11 for ’13: Rebecca Richards-Kortum believes college students can solve global problems

On the cusp of 2013, I’ve invited 11 of the greater Houston area’s top minds to write about something they believe, but cannot prove. A new entry in the 11 for ’13 series will be published each morning during the holidays.

Recently, I heard an interview with an entrepreneur who is trying to make clean water available to the one billion people in the world who lack access. When asked whether this was possible, he said, “If we found a cure for AIDS today and 100 years from now there were still 3 million dying every year because of the disease – that would be unthinkable. And yet we’ve known how to make water safe in developing countries for more than 100 years. It is a failure of imagination on our part if we can’t get it done.”

We don’t need to look far to find such failures. In 1902, Sir Ronald Ross received the Nobel Prize for discovering that mosquitoes transmit malaria. 110 years later, malaria kills 650,000 people every year – 90% in Africa, most of them children.

Richards-Kortum, second from left, and her students are recognized for their global healthcare work.

This is what happens when we don’t translate the results of research into solutions that matter for all the world’s citizens. How can we cross this “translation gap”? I think part of the solution lies in a seemingly unlikely place – with changing undergraduate education. There is a Haitian saying – you don’t learn to swim in the library, you learn to swim in the river. We often give students the knowledge to solve problems of global importance but don’t give them the skills to put that knowledge into practice.

Rice and many other universities are transforming education to engage students in solving global challenges. Students in Rice’s minor in global health technologies, for example, design technologies that address needs identified by developing world physicians. In 2009, we tasked a team of seniors with designing a solution to the leading cause of death among premature infants. Half of premature babies struggle to breathe because their lungs are immature. In the developed world, this is easily treated using bubble CPAP. But, at $6,000, CPAP machines are too costly for developing world hospitals. With guidance from pediatricians in Malawi and Houston, the students developed a $160 bubble CPAP system. In a clinical trial in Malawi, the device significantly improved neonatal survival. We are now working with the Ministry of Health to deliver the device to every public hospital in Malawi.

Students are hungry to make a difference, hungry to unleash their imaginations on the world. They must be given the tools to turn their ideas into practice. When they are able to experience first-hand how to turn discovery into action, they–and we–are forever changed.

To see other 11 for ’13 entries, click here. And you can click here see entries from the 11 for ’11 series that I published a year ago, and here for the 11 for ’12 series.

9 Responses

Now let’s get down to some real science.
More kids starve to death in Africa than any other continent.
What good will it do to cut back on malaria, what good will
it do to purify water, what good will
it do to reduce deaths of premature babies, if it will result in
a larger population with the same or higher percentage of
starvation in those human populations?

At some point we have to stop and totally reevaluate our “do-gooder”
ideas and acts. We first have to decide what population levels
can be supported. Then we have to design systems that support
those levels, not feed “beneficial” acts into an unstudied system,
then wondering why 100’s of thousands of people later died.

All efforts seem useful and hopeful but until we can come to grips with the reality of finite resources, food, clean usable water, clean energy and on and on available to us and the ability of reproduction to continually outpace them we will always be playing catch up. It’s too bad that no religion wants to be seen as possibly losing ground by facing up to the obvious. They all see success in terms of having their believers out numbering the non believers. Even reaching a dominant position is not satisfying enough. The quest goes on. Factor that into your solutions college students but expect to meet more than a little bit of resistance. Democracy is seen as the best way of resolving problems yet to come along but we all know how to win at that game…have more votes than those with opposing views.

Soporifix’s definition of “troll”: Someone who disagrees with me”. Indeed, just get rid of them, then my life will be so uncluttered with other people’s ideas and I can be left with all my own, how comfortable.

When scientists allow themselves to be drawn into political ads and photo-ops, featuring partisan politicians (they all are today), they no longer can hide behind the objective cloak of “science”, they have entered the political world. Just making that observation. If you play with dirt, you are going to get dirty.